A Good Story, Well Told

The people I lunch with at The Times hate it when I’m in the middle of a good non-fiction book. The books take forever to read. As the painful process goes on and I get more absorbed in whatever story is unfolding, it is all I can talk about. I’ve been able to control myself fairly well with my Demon book, “The Demon Under the Microscope.” I still have 4 hours left, however many pages that is. The connections to other flotsam floating around in my brain is causing overload.

I loved Chemistry in high school. I wanted to be a lab tech, but found out you work alone and have no one to talk to. What a bore. Of course, that was before CSI and the knowledge that you get to look through microscopes and carry a gun. Now that would have been fun. One day when my mother and I were in the car, I was telling her about the wonders of the carbon chain and how you could tell so much about the composition of the compounds just by their names. Jabber, jabber, jabber. It was thrilling to me. Then I lost my chemistry book and had to learn everything from lectures and an adorable lab partner. But that’s a different non-fiction story.

The Demon book is about the discovery of how sulfur can be used to cure strep related illnesses. Probably more types of illness, but that may be told in the last 4 hours. How bad were these illnesses? Thousands of women dying of child-birth fever; more people dying of infections after an operation than were helped by the operation. This book tells a good story. The author makes it very clear how dangerous life was before these cures were discovered. Little Calvin Coolidge jr. was running across the White House lawn in tennis shoes without socks. Got a blister, it became infected, he died. And then the stories of all the women who went into “lying in” hospitals to have their babies. They may as well have just slit their throats.

Then the synapses in my brain started to connect to stories I’d heard when I was a kid. What about Cinderella’s mother? She pricked her finger and died! Same thing almost happened to one of the researcher’s children. She broke a needle in her finger and almost died, but was cured by a sulfa compound. And I remembered hearing my parents and neighbor talking about a famous singer who had an injury in her leg and the “whatever” spread to her heart and she died. Man, I lived in horror of having a leg injury. But it was probably pre-sulfa and she had an infection.

Then there is the political intrigue of this book. The discovery was made in Hitler’s Germany, pre-war. Patents are involved, money to be made. The Franco-German rivalry plays a part in this story. Keeping Jews out of the lab; testing on animals is frowned on by Hitler, he calls it a Jewish tactic. Yes, that man was insane. The release to the public of these wonder drugs was delayed for years because the Germans were afraid of losing their patent, which only covered the process, not the drug. The French knew that and exploited it to their advantage. Maybe in the last 4 hours, Hitler stomps the French to get even.

This type of story combines all my favorite genres: mystery, history, science, biography. If any of those interest you, this is a good book. And the science is presented very clearly. You don’t have to worry about the author assuming any prior knowledge about chemistry. Just don't lose the book, because I don't think they make cute lab partners anymore who will share theirs.